In the United States, Louisiana has the "highest rate of beds per 1,000 persons ages 85 or more," but over half of the nursing homes in New Orleans decided against early evacuation. Thousands were looking for a place to go after leaving the Superdome shelter. [4], On August 28, 2005, at 6 am, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin announced that the Superdome would be used as a public shelter. But over the Gulf of Mexico, some 165 miles west of Key West, the storm gathered strength above the warmer waters of the gulf. As general manager of the facility since 1997, he had been through this several times before. Katrina's death toll is the fourth highest of any hurricane in U.S. history, after the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed between 8,000 and 12,000 people; Hurricane Maria, which. Gunfire has ricocheted down the corridors. Rather, the hurricane was named in accordance with the World Meteorological Organizations lists of hurricane names, which rotate every six years. They tried to use a trash can to create suction around the generator and pump the water out, but that plan failed. It took two days for 1,000 more FEMA officials to arrive, but once they did, FEMA "slowed the evacuation with unworkable paperwork and certification requirements." This is 40 or 50 feet up in the air. Thornton recruited off-duty NOPD officers to come grab sandbags and carry them from the parking lot, through the loading dock, and back to the generator room from the inside. Only after Katrina passed were people going to be bussed to shelters. Initially, the Superdome was described as a "lawless, depraved, and chaotic" place, with reports of numerous murders. Omissions? He needed to start getting people out. Updates? The 2005 New Orleans Bowl between the University of Southern Mississippi and Arkansas State University was moved from the Superdome to Cajun Field in Lafayette. They were acquitted in 2007. Inside the Dome, though, a small group of women and men fought to retain whatever order they could. Victims of Hurricane Katrina fight through the crowd as they line up for buses to evacuate the Superdome and New Orleans, Sept. 1, 2005. [39] However, that number also counted four bodies that were near the dome. All Rights Reserved. Tempers began to flare as hunger and thirst deepened. And,. He said he just wanted to get out, to go somewhere. by Laura Butterbaugh Thanks to the Internet, the images of the victims of Hurricane Katrina were as vivid as they were shocking: A hysterical woman pleading to TV cameras that women and girls were being raped in the Superdome. Tulane University postponed its scheduled football game against the University of Southern Mississippi until November 26. Hurricane Katrina was a 2005 storm that affected the southeast coast of the United States. Temperatures had reached the upper 80s, and the punctured dome at once allowed humidity in and trapped it there. A few blocks away, the strobes inside Charity Hospital flashed. [33], During the evening on August 31, about 700 elderly and ill patients were transported out by military helicopters and planes from Louis Armstrong International Airport to Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base in Houston. The Superdome was, as far as Thornton was concerned, completely destroyed. Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. Severe flooding damage to cities along the Gulf Coast, from New Orleans to Biloxi, Mississippi. Governor Blanco's comment regarding M-16s was likely in response to the reports of snipers shooting at police and rescue workers. It damaged more than a million housing units in the region. In Louisiana, where more than 1,500 people are believed to have died due to Katrinas impact, drowning (40 percent), injury and trauma (25 percent), and heart conditions (11 percent) were the major causes of death, according to a report published in 2008 by the American Medical Association. [49][50] Grambling State University beat Southern University, 5035.[51]. No electricity in New Orleans meant no air conditioning in the dome, filling it with a horrible, muggy heat. [35], On September 4, NOPD chief Eddie Compass reported, "We don't have any substantiated rapes. And I expect they will.". "Flooded offices meant records were underwater," and although there were some computerized records, according to then-Assistant Secretary of Children Welfare for Louisiana's Department of Social Services Marketa Walters, "New Orleans was notorious for not doing good data entry." Your effort and contribution in providing this feedback is much The fact that Black homeowners were more likely to face flooding than white homeowners wasn't an accident or bad luck. Residents of the B.W. They got it to the city and waited for their supplies. The heavy death toll of the hurricane and the subsequent flooding it caused drew international attention, along with widespread and lasting criticism of how local, state and federal authorities handled the storm and its aftermath. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Katrina is the costliest U.S. hurricane on record, inflicting some $125 billion in total damages. Upon making landfall, it had 120-140 mph winds and stretched 400 miles across the coast. The men had little time to celebrate though water was still coming in under the door. The chief of police had been given bad information. 2023 Cable News Network. And despite the fact that this was meant to be a temporary shelter, they ended up being stranded in the stadium for a week. When buses finally arrived yesterday, a desperate group of refugees broke loose from a cordon of National Guardsmen, but were stopped by heavily armed police toting machine guns. In all, 1,833 people would lose their lives. Mouton found out that there were sandbags available on Franklin Avenue inLakefront. September 1, 2005. The National Weather Service writes that Hurricane Katrina is "one of the five deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States.". Sustained winds of 70 miles (115 km) per hour lashed the Florida peninsula, and rainfall totals of 5 inches (13 cm) were reported in some areas. [1] After levees and flood walls protecting New Orleans failed, much of the city was underwater. The bad news is its going to take us several days to pump the water out of the city even if they can stop the water flow from coming in, Thornton recalls Nagin saying. According to CBS News, it took until March 2006 to find all of them: "All but 12 were found alive. This story has been shared 177,659 times. Isaac Chipps contributed reporting to this story. Many local agencies found themselves unable to respond to the increasingly desperate situation, as their own headquarters and control centres were under 20 feet (6 metres) of water. At their peak, hurricane relief shelters housed 273,000 people. Even though the dome never lost power, air conditioning, and running water during any of those storms, Superdome manager Doug Thornton recommended after Hurricane Georges for the dome to not be used as a shelter for anybody but special-needs evacuees. . Although FEMA had promised 360,000 military rations, only 40,000 had arrived by that day. According to National Geographic, "some argue that indirect hurricane deaths, like being unable to access medical care, should be counted in official numbers.". The population of the festering, battered dome had gone from 15,000 to 30,000 in a short time as helicopters and vehicles capable of cutting through the water picked up stranded citizens and brought them to the only place left to go in the entire city. Meanwhile, NOLA.com reports that New Orleans police officers were given authorization to shoot looters. In 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for the design of the levee system in New Orleans, acknowledged that outdated and faulty engineering practices used to build the levees led to most of the flooding that occurred due to Katrina. By the time the storm strengthened to a category 3 hurricane, winds exceeded 115 miles per hour. Thornton felt the seconds ticking, each one more dangerous than the last. Hurricane Katrina deaths, Louisiana, 2005 Disaster Med Public Health Prep. TV-PG. The storm spent less than eight hours over land. The storm that would later become Hurricane Katrina surfaced on August 23, 2005, as a tropical depression over the Bahamas, approximately 350 miles (560 km) east of Miami. Thornton remembers Compass telling him: Thats why I wanted to come over here and tell you so that you can get your families out.Thornton says Compass then told him he was taking his men out of the Superdome, before hugging him and saying he enjoyed working with him all these years. NPR reports that before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, "Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, FEMA Director Michael Brown and other top Homeland Security officials received emails on their blackberries warning that Katrina posed a dire threat." After passing over Florida, Katrina again weakened, and was reclassified as a tropical storm. We had to chase him down, said Sgt. Most of the tragedies associated with Hurricane Katrina could have been avoided, but due to a variety of reasons, the hurricane quickly became one of the worst disasters to ever occur in the United States. According to Talk Poverty, "a Black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. [32] National Guard officials put the body count at 6, which was reported by The Seattle Times on September 26. This is a nuthouse, said April Thomas, 42, there with her 11 children. Many people living in the South Florida area were unaware when Katrina strengthened from a tropical storm to a hurricane in one day and struck southern Florida on August 25, 2005, near the Miami-Dade - Broward county line. Socialist Alternative writes that police were given the task of "defending the private property of businesses like the GAP and casinos" rather than concentrating on rescuing people. The tropical depression that became Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005, and meteorologists were soon able to warn people in the Gulf Coast states that a major storm was. Within an hour, nearly every building in lower Plaquemines Parish would be destroyed. Doug and Denise Thornton woke early to drive back to New Orleans. Returning to Washington from Texas, Air Force One descended to about 5,000 feet to allow Bush to view some of the worst damage from Hurricane Katrina.
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